The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has asked Department of Telecommunications (DoT) to take action against Bharti Airtel and Hughes Communications for failing to provide data for specific user location and thereby not complying with conditions in their licence agreement.
Intelligence Bureau, under MHA, in a letter to DoT said, “Despite providing with Internet protocol (IP) addresses, dates and exact stamps, some telecom service providers (Airtel and Hughes) have been unable to provide details of the actual user in case of communications over GPRS/ Internet. As a result, we have been unable to trace our targets.”
The letter dated May 16 also said due to lack of timely and precise input from these firms, the operational effectiveness of the data was hampered, which resulted in operational ineffectiveness and failure of ongoing operation and ultimately undermining the importance of national security.
“DoT may direct these ISPs to redressing our concerns and may initiate strict action like levying some fine/penalty for their failure to adhere to conditions in licence agreement,” the IB said.
When contacted, Bharti Airtel in a statement said, “We have not received any such communication from the DoT. Bharti Airtel is in complete compliance with all conditions and agreements as per the stated government policy. We share all necessary information with law enforcement agencies to support their analysis.”
Pranav Roach, president, Hughes Network Systems India Ltd, in an email reply said, “Hughes complies with all legal, statutory and ethical requirements in India. In this case, we have and continue cooperating with the authorities. In this specific case, the IP address that was shared by the IB is used by multiple users and their query covered a large time band, both of which restricts our ability to provide further details or pinpoint a specific user. Therefore, we responded to the authorities asking them to help us narrow down the search by providing more information such as, for example, providing the URL or IP address that was visited by the IP address in question. Basis this, we will more accurately be able to identify the specific user of the IP address, thereby providing the information the IB seeks. It has been three weeks since we made this request and have not heard anything back from the authorities concerned. We will always cooperate and provide any information that may be required.”
The IB had cited two instances in the letter, one of Airtel and other of Hughes, where the service providers failed to fulfil conditions in the ISP (internet service provider) licence agreement under which they are bound to provide data without any delay on request from LEAs for resolving threat and malicious mails.
It also said that DoT had issued instructions through a letter on February 6 to all CMTS/UAS licensees to put in place a suitable mechanism for the same but nothing at the ISP/TSP level has taken shape so far.
